The Tattooist of Auschwitz Study Guide

Heather Morris was born in Te Awamutu, New Zealand. She grew up mainly in the village of Pirongia, where she lived with her parents and four siblings. As a child, Morris took an interest in storytelling, though her grades were average and she didn’t particularly gravitate toward writing down her ideas. Then, as a young woman in 1971, she moved to Melbourne, Australia, where she met her husband. They couple had two sons and a daughter. After returning to New Zealand to raise their children, the couple moved back to Melbourne in 1987, and in 1991 Morris decided to pursue higher education, feeling as if she had missed out by not attending university earlier in her life. With this in mind, she majored in political science at Monash University and then she went on to work as a social worker between 1995 and 2017. During this time, Morris also studied scriptwriting, which is why she originally tried to develop The Tattooist of Auschwitz into a screenplay when she was introduced to the real-life Lale Sokolov in 2003. Over the next three years, Morris became friends with Lale and she visited him often, listening to his story and gathering the information necessary to tell it to a wider audience. After Morris wrote the tale as a screenplay but she was unable to find anyone to make it into a movie, she decided to turn it into a novel instead. The Tattooist of Auschwitz has now sold over one million copies and it is a New York Times bestseller. 

The Tattooist of Auschwitz is based on the life of Lale Sokolov and his experience in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp located in Birkenau, Poland. Lale entered Birkenau as a prisoner in 1942 and he worked as the camp’s tattooist, staying there until two days before the Russian Red Army descended upon Auschwitz-Birkenau in January of 1945 and the troops liberated the remaining prisoners. At this point, Lale was moved by the Nazis to a concentration camp in Mauthausen-Gusen in Austria. When he eventually escaped the Nazis, he returned to his native Slovakia (which had been turned into Czechoslovakia at that point by the Soviet Union), where he searched for Gita and he soon found her. By October 1945, the couple got married and they set up a home in Bratislava, where they opened a factory that produced various fabrics. In the coming years, Lale and Gita worked quietly to support the creation of a Jewish state in Israel, sending money and valuables out of the country to strengthen the cause. When the Soviet Union discovered this, though, Lale was imprisoned. Thankfully, he was released shortly thereafter, at which point he and Gita fled Europe for Australia. In Melbourne, Gita gave birth to the couple’s only son, Gary Sokolov, and Lale once more opened a fabric and clothing business. For decades, Lale remained quiet about his time in the concentration camps because he feared that people would accuse him of being a Nazi collaborator, since he worked as the tattooist. When Gita died in 2003, though, he decided to tell his story, entrusting Heather Morris to make sure it reached a wide audience. Lale died in 2006, 12 years before The Tattooist of Auschwitz was published. 

The Tattooist of Auschwitz exists within a long and wide-ranging tradition of literature about the Holocaust. This includes famous titles like Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s List, Elie Wiesel’s Night, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, and The Diary of Anne Frank. Like all of these works, The Tattooist of Auschwitz is based on real events and people who actually experienced the Holocaust. However, whereas Night and The Diary of Anne Frank are autobiographical, The Tattooist of Auschwitz is more like Schindler’s List or Maus, in that these books were written about real people but not by those people. On another note, like many Holocaust books, The Tattooist of Auschwitz concerns itself with the act of survival. For this reason, it is also worth considering Primo Levi’s memoir Survival in Auschwitz, which—needless to say—also examines human resilience and what it takes to endure hardship. Furthermore, the way Heather Morris approaches morality in The Tattooist of Auschwitz brings to mind Hannah Arendt’s book of journalistic nonfiction, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. In this report, Arendt details the criminal trial of the infamous Nazi Adolf Eichmann, who claimed he was innocent because he was simply following orders and doing his job—a sentiment that aligns with Morris’s examination of the SS officers stationed at Auschwitz-Birkenau and their lack of remorse.